ADHD and Exercise

It's All in Your Head

New research on middle-school kids explores the link between riding and brainpower—and argues for adding more exercise into the lesson plans

bruce barcott

At Wilson Middle School in Natick, Massachusetts, the first school involved in the brain study, the graphic focus down below is all about the gray matter up above. (Simon Dunne)

The ADHD portion of their research comes at a time when parents and medical professionals are increasingly looking for alternatives to traditional drug therapies. A recently completed 10-year study of children with ADHD conducted by the NIMH found that medication often helps attention-challenged kids in the short term (one to two years), but those benefits wane as time goes on. “The reasons for this decline are under investigation,” NIMH officials said, “but they nevertheless signal the need for alternative treatments.”

At the same time, studies published by Charles Hillman of the Neurocognitive Kinesiology Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, one of the world’s leading centers for exercise and brain research, continue to back up Ratey’s claims. In one published in 2011 in the journal Biological Psychology, the lab’s researchers used brain scans to look at levels of cognitive control among nine- and 10-year-old children. (Cognitive control affects things like focusing attention, flexible thinking, controlling inappropriate responses, and maintaining information—abilities critical to performance in math and reading.) The upshot: Children with higher fitness levels activated more of the brain regions responsible for cognitive control than kids with lower levels, and completed a test with greater accuracy.

The question begged by those results, of course, is whether exercise causes or correlates. Does fitness boost the kids’ mental abilities, or are the smarter kids simply raised in environments that support greater physical and intellectual fitness? That’s one of the questions Lindsay Shaw and Alex Thornton hope their research will answer.

WHAT ABOUT ADAM Leibovitz, the pioneer cyclist who gave up his Ritalin for riding? As a student at Marian University in Indianapolis, he won the men’s Division 1 criterium and led his squad to a team-time-trial championship at the 2011 USA Cycling Collegiate Road Nationals. Today, at 21, he races professionally for Chipotle-First Solar, the under-23 development squad for the Garmin-Sharp-Barracuda team, both of which are managed by Jonathan Vaughters’s Slipstream Sports group.

Things have changed in John Ratey’s world, too. Five years ago, when he wrote Spark, Ratey relied heavily on data from Hillman’s lab and the real-world example of Naperville, Illinois, where the school district had introduced a radical new fitness program. He wrote extensively about Naperville largely because few other schools had the courage to try the initiative.

Ratey’s e-mail now pings regularly with requests from teachers and district administrators looking for information about the exercise-learning connection. “It’s really starting to explode,” he told me recently. At the time, he was between sessions at an education conference in Nova Scotia. He traveled there for a teachers’ meeting in the city of Dartmouth and a PE teachers’ seminar in Yarmouth; then to a cardiologists’ conference in Toronto; then to Calgary, Alberta, to talk with teachers and the city’s police chief. “He sees exercise as a possible way to help deal with juvenile delinquency,” Ratey said.

A growing body of scientific evidence backs him up. One recent study concluded that low levels of fitness are associated with declines in brain structure and function, cognitive abilities, and academic achievement. In contrast, Charles Hillman’s research has shown that a single session of exercise (20 minutes on a treadmill at 60 percent of maximum heart rate) can “charge” the brain’s neuro-electrical workings and lead to higher levels of cognitive functioning.